Scientific Tenets of Faith

On January 10th, 1985, Louisiana District Court Judge Adrian
Duplantier entered a summary judgement against the Creation Science
Legal Defense Fund. Judge Duplantier forbade instruction of creation-science
under the United States Constitution. He ruled the concepts of
creation and a Creator originate in religious conviction and are,
thus, implicitly unconstitutional-and unscientific. This decision
echoed the highly publicized result rendered in the Arkansas trial
of 1982. There, Judge William Overton ruled that creationism's
reliance upon "tenets of faith" precludes its acceptance
as scientific theory and, in turn, its use as proper public school
curriculum.

While this highly visible legal debate has raged over creationism's
qualifications as true science, another more fundamental question
about the true nature of science has escaped public discussion
almost entirely. Courtroom creationism has proved instructive
primarily by exposing philosophical naiveté about science's
ability to maintain continuity without its own "tenets of
faith." As faith in the foundational propositions of modern
science seems increasingly inexplicable to agnostic points of
view, one may wonder if science itself does not originate, philosophically,
in Christian conviction.

Questions of origin require prodigious doses of humility. While
advancing a particular Biblical view of origins, scientific creationists
have again learned the meaning of humility in the courtroom of
a Louisiana judge. Since their first defeat in Arkansas three
years ago, much has been written about the folly of legislating
curriculum that alters accepted scientific theory to fit particular
religious belief. Few, however, have commented critically on what
now constitutes accepted scientific theory, despite the threat
of a protracted appeals process that will again require addressing
precisely this question.

Certainly, to date, courtroom creationism has not limited expressions
of folly to zealots of a religious variety only. Defenders of
science, either because of impatience with creationist fervor
or because of their own philosophic ignorance, have played a much
stronger hand than they possess in describing the methods and
supposed autonomy of the scientific discipline.

We scientists are not immune to the need for intellectual humility
when discussing origins. Clearly, theorists might consider huimiliy
an asset when attempting to reconstruct the origin of the universe
and its life. But more importantly, humility is essential to discussions
about the methodological and presuppositional roots of science
itself.

Sadly, a scientific education often neglects such discussions.
Questions of method and meaning comprise the stuff of philosophy,
and disciplines like epistemology seem far too esoteric for those
trained to view the world as a collection of physical, chemical
and biological causes.

This is not to say scientists are narrow-minded technocrats
with no appreciation of ethical considerations or artistic sentiment.
Rather only, that we in this century have learned our science
in a context of philosophic naturalism and positivism that ignores
the entire conceptual framework necessary to modern science.

These philosophies attempted to objectify scientific inquiry
by rejecting any belief that could not commend itself to the strict
scrutiny of observation. The attempt failed. Instead, these philosophies
have introduced a serious internal contradiction into the structure
of natural science, quite the reverse of their expressed intentions.

Naturalism assumed all events to be exclusively the result
of physical or natural causes. It was, thus, forced to view the
human mind as a composite of evolutionary adjustments responding
to chemical and biological stimuli. An intellect, however, that
responds solely to stimuli can think only that which stimuli cause
or determine it to think. In this scheme, with the human mind
viewed as a machine, the validity of human reason and natural
science is destroyed. The mind cannot know truth; it can only
produce response. As Professor Haldane has said, "If mental
processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my
brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ... and
hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms."

Another school of thought, known as logical positivism, also
wrought internal contradiction. In presuming all knowledge must
come through the senses, the positivist assumed knowledge of something
that, quite ironically, could not be verified through the senses.
The premise that no truth exists independent of experimental verification
crumbled beneath the realization that the positivist premise was
itself quite impossible to observe in the laboratory. Even many
philosophy texts, typically judicial in approach, now record without
hesitation the dissolution of positivism as a credible philosophy
of science.

Far from accomplishing their purpose, these viewpoints have
begun to undermine a belief in the validity and objectivity of
scientific theorizing. Many philosophers of science, long aware
of the extent to which scientists creatively contribute to the
result of experiment--through personal judgment, intuitive guesswork,
and a whole network of conceptual beliefs--now regard knowledge
as essentially subjective. The scientist's final justification
for his theory, in their view, rests wholly within. Some suggest
that causal links and the order men perceive in the universe are
impositions of the human intellect, rather than real features
of our world. In this vein, in 1980, a prominent French physicist
wrote to Scientific American arguing that the idea of an
objective reality independent of human consciousness is untenable
in light of the new physics.

This is heady stuff, to be sure. And such overt skepticism
rarely circulates even in the academic world far beyond those
in quantum physics or philosophy departments. Yet, it often conveys
a kind of cynicism that easily permeates culture and can only
serve to enhance an already pervasive relativism and personal
alienation. Modern poetry abounds with the themes of poets languishing
in cosmic loneliness--a loneliness that is underscored, fundamentally,
by a curious inability to give meaning to perceptions, or to know
anything truly outside one's own mind.

Many of us, who do not take such a grim view and who realize
the absurd consequence of attempting to live, let alone conduct
science, by skepticism regarding our own logical faculties, believe
there is another alternative. The failure of the positivist's
view to validate scientific method only serves to illustrate the
role and necessity of making intelligent foundational assumptions.
These foundational premises, by nature, do not avail themselves
either to proof or disproof. Scientists may, however, choose assumptions
that lend explanation and meaning to the necessary functions of
Inquiry. Certainly those who choose to live with skepticism, however,
cannot be disproved.

Ironically, these foundational assumptions are not unlike the
much scorned "tenets of faith" whose detected presence
in creation theory first disqualified it as legitimate science
in an Arkansas federal court three years ago. This observation
neither suggests nor repudiates a defense of creation theory as
legitimate science. It does, however, assert that from the definition
offered by the American Civil Liberties Union, and the press's
coverage of the scientific community at the time of the trial,
science itself does not qualify as legitimate science.

In an excellent article capturing the pre-trial mood of many
in the scientific community, Wall Street Journal science editor
Mr. Jerry Bishop identified an interesting philosophical shift
in the creation science court debate. The precedent-setting Arkansas
debate hinged, he asserted, on whether or not creation science
could demonstrate "the properties of a scientific theory."

Mr. Bishop's Wall Street Journal report of the scientific consensus,
"Creation Theory Doesn't Predict-or Postdict," cited
two accepted elements of scientific theorizing. Ironically, though
both of Mr. Bishop's criteria were accurate, neither could be
sustained or validated by the strict empiricism of the positivist
outlook. Yet many scientific voices held up the positivist position
to the press throughout the trial proceedings as the basis for
dismissing creationism.

Mr. Bishop reported that a scientific theory first must have
the properties of prediction and postdiction. Scientists recognize
that these terms refer to the process of inductive reasoning applied
to the past and to the future. Induction, the inference of universal
rules describing nature from observed facts, has often provoked
skepticism by those who reflect on scientific method. Since the
time of David Hume, philosophers have recognized that the validity
of inference rests on the truth of an assumption that is a tenet
of faith--namely, that nature remains uniformly ordered throughout
space and time.

Mr. Bishop's second criterion, falsification, also rests on
the acceptance of an assumption. The doctrine of falsification
states that a theory is scientific only if the possibility exists
to disprove (or falsify) it by observation. Though falsification
clearly cannot provide a valid rule for theory verification, it
can not, of its own, supply a valid rule for theory rejection
either. Theories are rarely disqualified on the basis of raw data
alone and certainly never on the basis of just one perturbation.
In every experiment, scientists exercise judgment about what ought
to be regarded as data.

Scientists make these judgments in accord with a whole network
of foundational beliefs. Many of these beliefs are inferred from
other observations. Others are concepts and intuitions that are
the contribution of the observer. These concepts (for examples,
space, time or matter for the physicist) act as a kind of gridwork
through which the scientist passes and orders his observation.
Such creative mental contributions must be presupposed to correlate
meaningfully to the world outside the observer, for falsification
to be considered a valid guide to inquiry.

Clearly, for man, the commodity of truth (even the truth of
falsifiability) requires an expenditure of faith. In natural science,
truth rests on expenditures of faith in propositions that necessarily
fall out of the realm of empirical study and into the realm of
epistemology, metaphysics and theology. Given the current and
historical difficulty human philosophic systems have faced in
accounting for truth as autonomous from revelation, scientists
and philosophers might be most receptive to systems of thought
that find their roots in Biblical theology.

The Judeo-Christian scriptures have much to say about the ultimate
source of human reason, the existence of a real and uniformly
ordered universe, and the ability present in a creative and ordered
human intellect to know that universe. Both the Old and New Testaments
define these relationships such that the presuppositional base
necessary to modern science is not only explicable but also meaningful.
Moreover all of us would do well to reflect on the scriptural
axiom that "in Him all things hold together," and further
reflect on the serious consequences to a society and culture that
divorce spiritual thought not only from moral considerations but
scientific ones as well.

Notes

1.The lawyers representing creationism have
already submitted an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The
creationist strategy, in general, remains the waging of a war
of attrition. They plan to keep creation-science alive in appeal
until conservative Reagan appointees begin to stock the courts
in greater numbers.